Future Planning

The garden is divided into three main zones.

Zone 1 contains a bordered area covered in plum slate. It's got a rockery at one end and a plant at the other but largely it consists of a place to put planters and pots.

Zone 2 is at the back left and consists of a weeping-type shrub and loads of randomly-selected plants leading to a huge overgrowth of madness. Sweet peas and all sorts have grown like mad. The plan for next year is to hand this section over to Fran and Sam once I've raised and levelled it off and it will then mostly form a lawn with the odd low-lying meadow flower, plus a border etc for them both to plant stuff in.

Zone 3 is my tiers. Here's an old picture that I've scrawled numbers onto:

It's not a great representation as the whole thing looks a bit different now but you get the general idea. The tiers were put in place fairly late in the year so I never got round to planting anything much other than some shrubs and fruit bushes. We originally planned one of the tiers (3b) as being the lawn and Sam's play area but I ultimately decided it's too small and potentially unstable. This led to the decision to turn zone 2 over to lawn and Sam.

So the future plans for this are now under consideration. 3a is currently fruit and the odd shrub. I'll probably add what other fruit plants I can fit in there, possibly including a container dwarf plum tree - though this is likely to unbalance the look of the thing and may be better sited elsewhere. This is an ericaceous zone by intent but it certainly suffers a massive buffering effect from the tier soils and the underlying clay.

The remaining zones I think I will dedicate to colours. This isn't particularly radical but I like the idea of them acting as contrasting solid blocks of colour. 3e has a black sambucus (which is staying put) so I have dedicated this to Pink. I think this will work well as contrasted against the black of the sambucus. The sambucus also produces small pink flowers to tie it together. 3c will be white. It'll have pale foliage where possible and clean, white flowering plants. The shrub in this zone is (I think) a plant that produces small pink flowers and white berries so this should work nicely across from the black and pink zone.

3b and 3d are more difficult. I thought of orange for the front to go with the dragon (firey colours, etc) but I think that would be too distracting in the foreground. I may move the dragon to the back to switch places with the easter island head but I also think the positioning of them would then look wrong. I think I'd rather have the orange at the back.

3b is possibly going to be done as just green but then there's not many green flowers and I don't think I want just foliage. Blue I'm not very keen on, I think purple, yellow and red would all distract as well. Hmm, maybe I'll go with green. It'll be a challenge to find much suitable but I'm sure there has to be something.

So in summary:

Zone 1 - no change
Zone 2 - lawn, meadow plants, some bedding things
Zone 3a - no change, fruit and shrubs
Zone 3b - green
Zone 3c - white
Zone 3d - orange
Zone 3e - pink

Yes, that'll do.

Black chillis

I have been growing some cayenne chilli peppers this year from seed so as to avoid the hassle that comes with supermarket chilli-buying - that is, buying three, using two, binning one.

They were grown from a Sutton's Seeds pot thing - it was basically a bit of compost, some seeds and a container to propagate in. I got pretty good results and potted them out and they've been doing nicely outside. I ended up with six plants, though two were so stupidly planted that they never made it.

Anyway, I currently have four quite solid plants. They've needed staking to stop them flopping down but they're otherwise grand. Many fruit have now been produced but I've noticed some black patches appearing on them. The Internet seems a bit vague on the cause of these but I think I've come to a conclusion. This is what they look like:

There's a sort of burnt-looking region on this chilli. Now, at first this was the only chilli showing this so I imagined some sort of defect. However, several now show exactly the same thing so I researched online to see what the cause was. Internet reckoned:

1. Darkening before ripening to red.
2. Rotting.
3. Sun burning.

They seem good and firm and the one I cut up tonight (the one above in fact) was perfectly fine so no rotting. I'm not convinced they are going red. So that leaves us sun burning. I happened to notice that the black areas only appear on a single side of the affected fruits and that side matches the direction of the sun at around midday to 2pm - the strongest time for sun exposure, plus this is a heatwave year. In fact, if you look closely at the picture you can see quite a clear line showing what would match the strongest sun exposure.

I therefore conclude:

Black patches on cayenne chilli peppers are due to excessively bright sun.

On We Go

It's been a while since doing all that much with the garden. Firstly there was a heatwave which really limits what you can do other than watering every bloody minute you get. Then there was a load of rainy weather which is good and all but what can you do other than wait for it to stop raining? Combined with general business it's been mostly just waiting about and letting the garden do its thing.

So today we finally got a decent combination of bit of rain but drying up which is perfect. First thing in the morning it was quite reasonable too so I did a lot of inspecting and tidying up. From previous clearances I had a load of tubs and containers full of stray soil which had filled up with water and weeds and general crap. An hour of so of back-breaking labour cleared these via the medium of tipping them all out into a pile so they can drain and I'll deal with the bloody stuff later.

Other than that it looked like the two pieris in the rockery were slowing dying. This came as no surprise as they'd been hammered by the heatwave and also planted in the wrong type of soil - they want acid and I didn't realise so they've been sat in crappy multipurpose stuff. They have now been dug out and the rockery rearranged to give them more space and replanted into proper ericaceous compost. The rockery also had some attention regarding a hidden sedum being moved to a more prominent location and a euphorbia having it's long dying flower stems cut off. This left a nice little foliage thing:

I did discover after cutting it back that sap is toxic and that it tends to gum up secateurs. Fortunately I didn't get any on me, phew.

I did a load of rearranging of plants.

Those are both eucalyptus that have been moved. One is in an old disused lampshade. I remembered this time to soak them first so they don't wilt really sadly when repotted. They have had the crap eaten out of them and have fungus. C'est la vie.

I potted out some olive trees that I've been growing from seed. Only two of germinated and here's one:

I have chillis!

And olives!

And proto-raspberries!

Our garage door has also been colonised by caterpillars. I saw one stuck on it yesterday and it looked like it was dying but today it has turned into this:

It's a chrysalis! It swings about a bit when opening and closing the garage but it seems to be staying on. Fran saw another caterpillar climbing up the wall earlier and now I have found this:

It's chrysalising! We will have two butterflies of our very own to have and to hold.

Oh, and we got a couple of plants. Firstly a little patio rose. I thought about trying to bonsai it but from the sounds of it people who try to bonsai roses are on a hiding to nothing.

Secondly a little juniper. I wanted one of these ages ago for the rockery but couldn't find one. Now I don't want to plant it in the rockery due to the ongoing bamboo problem so it's going in a pot for the time being. I want to get some cuttings from it for bonsai and it may make it onto the rockery for next year:

And they also had this mad bastard:

It's another juniper and was heavily reduced so I got it too. It is now sat in another disused lampshade. They are good as they have drainage holes and everything. But aye, not really sure what to do with this, it was just spiky chaos so I got it.

And that's the state of the garden.

That'll do

It's with a sense of almost disappointed weariness that I finally finish the bulk of the garden work. After a load of earth-moving, smoothing, filling rubble sacks and planting we have my finished tiers:

There's a bit where I want another plant but I could live without it. It has a 'Black Lace' Sambucus:

A dragon:

And a face:

On my way out I also discovered that there were some late developers in the propagator that I'd already planted out from:

Not sure what to do with them. They're asparagus and I've already got tonnes of that planted out:

Got three of those troughs.. I don't really want to just kill them off though, after all they've been through..

The lavender is going mad, can't wait to see this lot flower:

Shallots doing well, I didn't really think they were like this - I expected something like the simple grasses of garlic but these are quite funky:

Spinach may be dead:

Chillis are shooting up. It seems like I look away for a bit and they double in size:

There's some other things too but that's the main stuff. Phew, tired now..

Done, ish

Been working hard again and the garden tiers are basically done.

This is mainly a post to record what has died. That is, three of my fruit bushes that never really took and the following two shrubs from the shrub collection:

Berberis Thunb
Potentilla Fruticosa

There is a third but I've lost the label off that.

I'll probably do some pictures later once I've decided which four of my shrubs will go alongside the fruit bushes.

Just read the following on wikipedia about one of my plants:

"In second-growth woodlands of New England, a thicket of lilac may be the first indication of the cellar-hole of a vanished nineteenth-century timber-framed farmhouse."

How intriguing.

Probably excessive

My garden and indoor growing projects have expanded beyond my ability to adequately manage them. Plants I have:

• Various nasturtiums
• Cornflowers
• Field Poppies
• Chillis
• Garlics
• Shallots
• Spinach
• About 35 bloody asparagus in three huge troughs
• Eucalyptus bush
• Basil
• Bush basil
• Bergamot
• Sweet peas of various sorts
• Misc bulbs
• Rosemary
• Olive tree
• Lavender tree
• Skimmia japonica (Bronze Knight)
• Violas
• Lonicera
• Euphorbia
• Sedums of red and green
• Thyme - both low-lying and bushy
• Saxifrage
• Two kinds of pieris
• Some kind of Jack Frost thing that is barely alive
• Gro-sure easy flowers - pastel and bright
• Wild flower mix
• Small early fruit bushes - six of these but not all looking like surviving
• Shrub collection - Berberis Thunb, Weigela Rosea, Cornus Alba, Cornus Alba, Forsythia Int. ‘Spectabilis, Philadelphus Coronarius, Potentilla Fruticosa, Ribes Aureum, Spiraea Douglasii, Symphoricarpos Albus, Syringa Vulgaris
• Sambucus 'black lace' - mostly due to a sort of pun on Sam's name
• Acer Palmitum - can't remember the cultivar name but it's pretty
• Planted olive tree seeds to watch
• Pine seeds

And I've probably even forgotten some. This is way out of hand.

Landscapes

I've spent most of the weekend doing more garden sorting. The chaos is gradually giving way and the patio area is no longer strewn with junk:

Apart from the two chairs on the right, they're pretty junky. Just around the corner is where I've moved my storage box and put up a ten-quid ASDA greenhouse thing. Actually quite sturdy, but the shelves are shite.

After that a good part of yesterday was putting excess rubble and soil into bags in preparation for taking the tip. I was out stupidly early this morning filling about fifteen rubble sacks and the last bit of garden was finally taking shape, though that shape was basically a huge mound of crap. I took a break to tend to the other bit of garden by laying some stepping stones:

They are square 'stonewood' railway sleepers. The rest of that is starting to come to life as well;

^^An example of the many germinations.

After that it was back to the main event. We ended up wondering about the best thing to do with the remainder of the garden. A few weeks back we were at Webbs at Wychbold (really excellent garden centre, though is far away in the Midlands) and they had a riverside garden area. We were early and this was open before the shop was so we wandered round it and they had this sort of tiered thing made with those log rolls you can get. So we decided to do it.

I must have moved about a tonne of earth today building this thing, and the ground is a complete bastard - still full of stones. Managed to clear most of it and get down to some half-decent clay-earth stuff to dig the required trenches and ta-da:

Still more to do but that's it so far. The earth in those bits needs levelling out and there's another tier to come. We're going to alternate flowers and lawn and then an ericaceous zone right at the base. Hard work, that. It's a bit.. let's say 'rustic' in finish as I'm not a professional but it'll do.

Also, got some Sweetpeas doing well:

And I probably should have heeded Helen's warning about Nasturtiums:

That's in the rockery. I never planted it, the nasturtiums are now in the front garden and THEY HAVEN'T EVEN FLOWERED YET. God knows how that one got that but I'm going to leave it be, for showing pluck.

A Use for Surplus Technology

A little while ago Barnes and Noble realised that nobody was buying their ereaders and so they went on an aggressive price-cutting spree in an attempt to get people to buy them and then spend money in their ebook shop. Their basic model (Nook Simple Touch) was cut to £29 and as it had physical buttons and an SD slot I impulse-bought one after a rapid lunchtime run to John Lewis.

It's nice enough and all, but the physical buttons aren't really clicky enough for me. Better than nothing, of course, but really a bit of a let-down. As was the B&N shop itself, it's not particularly easy to find much, pretty ropey set of freebies on there and so I ended up not really using it as a book reader - possibly due to already owning two other ereaders. Oh well, c'est la vie.

Of course, that's not the whole story. NO WAY.

You see, it turns out that the Nook Simple Touch runs Android - the famous mobile operating system. One of the defining aspects of this operating system is its openness and ability to be customised fully. This is typically done via 'root' access which grants access to the deeper recesses of the file system and lets you do special stuff (including breaking it but I'm not going to do that).

So, it's runs Android and can be rooted. This required further investigation. Following this guide here:

http://www.babblingengineer.com/how-to/how-i-turned-my-nook-into-an-e-reader-monster/

I installed root access, a fresh launcher to bypass the Nook software and the Google Play Market to get at my Android apps. Basically the process is:

• Download a thing.
• Write an image of that thing onto a microSD card.
• Put card in Nook.
• Boot.
• Press the button which says 'Root'.

In a nutshell. That was all fine and snazzy and fully engaged me for a good chunk of evening but then I put it in my bag and did very little else with it. A couple of weeks later, an idea occurred to me:

WHAT ABOUT MAKING IT INTO A KITCHEN COMPUTER AND FRIDGE AND FREEZER AND OTHER SUPPLIES MONITOR

With wifi connectivity at home and certain Android apps ability to sync with each other I could have it next to the fridge with a list of general supplies which could be ticked off when we need to buy more. Then when we are in a shop we could consult our phones and see what we need to pick up. But then, even better,

WHAT ABOUT MOUNTING IT ON THE FRIDGE WITH MAGNETS

Even better indeed. So, after some reading it looks like 'rare earth' neodymium magnets are the way to go as they are extremely strong for their size. There's not all that many sources for these but the Magnet Expert sells on Amazon and I got these:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0022BPXES/ref=pe_217191_31005151_M3T1_dp_1

They are 20x6x1.5mm magnets with a sticky backing. Just the thing for sticking a Nook on the fridge.

They arrived promptly and even had a safety leaflet inside. This also mentioned that you shouldn't let them go to snap together with force, snap and then return them claiming they were broken in the post which seems fair enough.

I first tried to cut a slit into the Nook cover to insert the magnets inside it but I was foiled by the inverse square law - they were too far from the from the surface to have enough pull. So I stuck a load around the outside of it:

You can see that the left edge has two. The inner one is to solve the problem of the crappy case not holding the Nook very well - it flops about. I stuck two magnets to the back of it as a brace and that inner-left magnet provides enough force to keep it more securely stuck. It's also extra force for on the fridge and it sticks very securely now.

That's as far as I've gotten for now. Stay tuned for more.

Garden Adventure - a never-ending tale

Of course, it'd never be as simple as doing a bit of gardening and it being done. No, there's more to do.

Today I've been trying to clean out the gap between our extension and our garden. The garden as a whole is effectively on a huge 'raised bed' that it about five foot higher than the house. The extension was built to approach this but with about a 75cm gap. ie; too large to ignore completely, too small to be genuinely useful. During the tidying up of the rest of the garden this became full of crap like mud, bags, gravel, bramble root-nodes flung away in fury. Enoiugh organic matter had gathered down there to become true soil and it's been a bastard to clear. I tried some today by sort of sweeping and spraying with the hose but to minimal effect. Lots of it is flowing into great big holes into the underneath of the house. This needs patching up but that's a job for another day. I've given up on tidying this nook for the moment.

The rest of the garden is coming along though. The upper left area (zone 2 as dubbed on my sketched garden plan) has gotten a bamboo border put in and has been trawled, turned over, raked, picked over and all sorts. I've removed a ton of stone from there but lots remains. I decided that good enough is good enough and began planting:

This first involved an Asda bag of bulbs from last year, half of which were mush and the other half probably killed off by the winter spent outside in my storage box. Then some random sweet pea seeds went into the earth, a pack of 'wildflowers' and a load of GrowSure 'Easy Flowers'. These are big bags of flower seeds mixed in with feed and compost etc that you can throw about and hope they grow. I suspect they will be special infertile versions to stop me harvesting seeds from them for next year, but we'll see.

Over on the left there you can see Rockery 2. I decided that a way to use up the even greather quantity of loose stone would be to have a second rockery. This also breaks up that bit of garden, smooths out the gradients and hides a pointless step. It has been planted with a mix of things.

The crowning glory is this euphorbia something or other. It's tall and has interesting leaves:

Two pieris things - silver flame (top) and little heath (other). One was bought because of the excellent leaves and the other due to buy-one-get-one-free:

I can't really remember what this one is called but it's 'Jack Frost' as a subtype:

Not that the rest of the garden is being totally ignored. The right-hand-side (zone 1) has had things happen and now looks like this:

That probably represents its final state. Rockery, some tubs, slate. The rockery has some new additions:

Above is a skimmia japonica 'Bronze Knight', sitting proudly at the top of the whole thing:

The one on the left could probably use some careful pruning. A bit of other stuff is provided by these:

One is a saxifrage, one a thyme variant and one a black viola.

I think the path needs some work:

It's ended up messy due to the poor seating of cobbles and the gravel. I'm going to have to bite the bullet and mortar them down, do it properly.

Other tubs include;

Garlic!

Nasturtiums and cornflowers!

Cayenne!

Oh and I put some stones on some trees/herbs to keep water in. There's some bark too which I was worried about using due to soil depletion but it'll come good in the end.

Finally:

Some more sweet peas planted from seed and some cuttings that have been soaked, dipped in rooting gel and planted. These were mostly gathered from parks and so on. See if any of them work..

And now I am sore and tired.

It's Finished! Except..

Well, tonight saw a huge amount of activity in the garden. Making good use of the weather and being home a bit early I decided to haul some things about and finish off the right-hand side of the garden. This mainly involved building a rockery.

Not being at all sure how to go about this, I simply piled up rocks in an attempt to look sort of natural and pleasing. I then pushed up to it with my final bag of slate and then planted a shrub in it. It's going to have more plants so it's not strictly finished, but here it is:

There it is, in all its glory. You can probably notice a few Rainbow Cobbles which I'll probably dispense with when it has plants. These work in some places but not in this. Here they are making a path:

That works reasonably. They are bright and shiny.

But to return to the main point; garden is finished:

as long as you don't look a little bit to the left...

Work work.